The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
As a result of widespread and growing use, vast quantities of media content exist nowadays. Given the sheer quantity and variety of audio and video content that exists in various formats and encodings, and the expanding growth of that content over time, the ability to correctly identify media content is of particular value. One type of approaches for identifying media content is based on the use of media fingerprints.
Media fingerprints are identifiers of the media content from which the media fingerprints are derived, extracted, or generated. For example, acoustic fingerprints may be derived or otherwise generated from a particular audio waveform as code that uniquely corresponds thereto, and video fingerprints may be derived or otherwise generated from a particular video sequence based on video content characteristics such as luminance, chrominance, and motion descriptors. Media fingerprints may be stored in reference databases in association with various metadata information that describe and identify the media content objects from which the individual fingerprints are generated. The stored media fingerprints may be accessed to identify, categorize, or otherwise classify an object or a sample of media content, such as music or other audio content and a video sequence or other video content. Such identification, categorization, and classification of media content may be useful in a variety of contexts such as copyright management, validation of authorized uses of content, and detection of unauthorized use of various versions, copies, and other items of content.